


A week in the life of Aaravos

by The_Kat



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Emotions, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25865566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Kat/pseuds/The_Kat
Summary: Aaravos is a very powerful archmage, who always seems to be calm and collected. He doesn’t seem affected by the long years of isolation he suffered imprisoned for yet unknown reasons behind a magical mirror.But for a smart person like him, the dullness of being stuck alone in one place for decades must surely have been unbearably boring at some point or another.Did he get angry? Did he feel frustrated, helpless? Did he maybe even feel lonely? And what did he do to keep himself distracted and prevent him from going insane?Let me take you to the other side of the mirror, dear reader, to give you some insight into the home and mind of our favourite Startouchelf. Get ready for a week in the life of Aaravos.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	1. Monday

**Author's Note:**

> Because as of the end of season 3 not much is known about our favourite elf, about 99.9% of this story, including character background and setting, are self-invented. I am, however, keeping it 100% canon-compliant, so nothing you read in this story should explicitly contradict anything in seasons 1 to 3. If I messed up, please correct me in the comments. Thanks! Please enjoy.

We meet Aaravos on our fist day in the late evening. The sky outside is already dark, so the elf’s study room is lit by a number of candles on the walls and on the three desks that take up the far end of the room underneath a large window. In front of the middle desk, we find the Startouchelf. There is a luxurious chair behind him, but he isn’t sitting on it. He stands, his hands with the four delicate fingers propped on both sides of a heavy book. It looks old, the writing faded but elegant, and it speaks of magic. Old and complicated magic. Very complicated.  
With a look of high concentration, Aaravos waves a hand and the page turns in a soft breeze that also catches a strand of the elf’s long white hair and playfully twirls it. Absentmindedly, he pushes it out of the way and leans in closer.  
He has spent all day trying to figure out this ritual. Years ago he had found mention of a human mage, who used dark magic to recreate the shadow form of the Moonshadowelves. He hadn’t given it much attention at first. He has no need to sneak, he is powerful enough to go wherever he pleases and if a situation does call for some discretion he has his own ways of being invisible. Also, he is stuck here, rendering the whole thing totally useless anyway.  
But one has to keep oneself occupied and learning new things that should be impossible are exactly the kind of distraction he needs. That in doing so he also takes the specialness from the Moonshadowelves is an added layer of fun.  
Or, it would be, but the ritual had proven itself quite useless so far.  
With his other hand, he flips the page back. The words start to blur before his eyes. Annoyed he decides to call it a day. After all, it’s not as though he is in any hurry. As far as he knows, he has eternity to figure this out.  
With a wave he calls all candle flames to him and in the flickering light of his fist full of fire he leaves the room and closes the door.  
The corridor we are now in is beautifully decorated. It has a high ceiling with ornate plastering, soft carpets of a deep purple colour and large windows that, in daytime, show a magnificent view of the gardens, but at the moment the darkness outside is only parted by the soft glow of some moon-moths and fireflies.  
Aaravos doesn’t even spare them a glance. Outside isn’t the outside. It is just the gardens that get less and less solid the further you go until they fully dissolve and you float in utter darkness. Aaravos had tried to go through the darkness, of course. He had tried a number of times at different edges of the land. He had walked for hours, sometimes he flew, he had used every magic he knew to keep him moving, keep him on a straight path. But it had taken him nowhere and the moment he turned around he was back at the edge of the land where the ground started to become solid again and there were insects, light and life. He doesn’t understand how this magic works and he hates it almost as much for that as for keeping him locked up.

The elf rounds a corner and follows the corridor to a flight of stairs at the end. One hand on the delicate hand rail, one still holding the flames, he ascends to the second floor. The corridor up here is furnished in lighter tones, white and lavender, to the left more large windows.  
Aaravos opens a door to the right and enters. He thrusts out his hand and the flames shoot through the darkness, igniting the logs in a large oven. Soon, the room is filled with friendly bright light and the crackling sound of a warm fire. We can see a clean, tiled floor, shelves and cupboards in warm browns that fill the sides of the room organically, a stove above the oven and a sink with an elegant pump. Aaravos opens some shelves and drawers and gets out a plate of thin china and some fruits that are obviously of Xadian origin. He fills a crystal glass with water from the sink, adds some moonberry juice, then sits down at a wooden table and starts eating.  
It is a monotone ordeal, three times a day, every day, for years, decades. Always the same room, the same food. His lands provide him with everything he needs, drawing sunlight, rain and minerals from the place his estate used to be at, but he only has the plants he had grown there when he was imprisoned. Luckily they were a lot, as he had used them for experiments on Dark Magic, but after years of the same fruit and vegetables he would kill for some bread, eggs or milk.  
He finishes his meal and gives the plate a quick rinse, then calls the flames to his fist once more with one sweeping motion and moves on to the bathroom in the adjacent room for his evening routine. Afterwards he moves one room further down to a large bedroom. We can see a desk littered with notes and quills, a large wardrobe made of dark wood and a small mirror above a dressing table. The floor is covered by a fluffy blue carpet and at the far end of the room we see a wooden bedframe with a large, soft mattress. The bed is covered by a dark blue canopy sprinkled with stars and pillows and blanket are of the same fabric.  
Aaravos extinguishes the flames in his hand, turning the room into darkness with only the soft glow of the fireflies outside the window and the stars on his bedding providing some light.  
We leave Aaravos as he slowly drifts to sleep under his fake night sky with nothing but his dreams to keep him company.


	2. Tuesday

His study is a mess. When Aaravos walks in, freshly dressed, his hair still messy from sleep and a cup of hot, brown morning drink in hand, he lets out an annoyed groan. The chaos is his own fault of course. After all, there is nobody else in these chambers that are his prison.  
Aaravos finishes his drink then calles upon the sky and with a wave of his hands, the books, potions, powders, pens and ink lift off the ground. With elegant gestures he sorts them, placing everything neatly on the desks and shelves. Better.

He sets to work. Last night he has had an epiphany what could be missing from the ritual.  
He starts by assembling all the ingredients he already knows like he has done a couple of times before: Moon-dust, dried tide-hearb and some drops of morning dew. He shops up a milk-fruit, crushes a moon-moth, peels a dirigible plum and finishes with a pinsh of salt.

The old pendulum clock at the wall next to the door strikes nine. Aaravos puts aside the ingredients and gets up, brushing moon-dust off his clothes. He leaves his study and goes outside into the gardens. The sun is shining, the air is fresh and smells pleasantly of flowers and grass. He squints up at the sky.  
He thinks they are real, the sun and the clouds that sometimes bring fresh rain. He thinks that its the same sky above the land his estate used to be on. It rains less than it used to, though, so he thinks he shares with the now bare land.  
Well, it probalbly wasn’t bare anymore. He had chosen a beautiful spot to live, on a hill, right next to a cliff with a beautiful view of a huge lake. Surely, somebody else lived there now. He hoped he was right with his guess on how the weather in his prison worked. The new owner of his land would wonder why they were getting less rain and their soil seemed less fertile than the surrounding land. The thought makes him smile.

He takes off his cloak and robe and starts with his morning workout. Sports keep the mind and body healthy, so he shedules it just as his meals or sleep. After a quick shower and some breakfast, he heads back outside to tend to his garden. He used to have some human employees to keep his extensive lands in order and it had taken him some time to figure out a way to do it all by himself efficiently and without taking up all his time, but by now it’s a routine just like everything else.  
On his land, he grows a wide variety of plants: Bushes, trees, fruits, vegetables, flowers, and they all serve a purpose, be it food or Magic. He also keeps a small number of different animals that he is careful to keep constant. He doesn’t eat meat, but living creatures are essential for Dark Magic, especially the larger rituals he practices.  
The shadowform ritual doesn’t require a large sacrifice though, so for the time being his animals are safe. He finishes feeding them then heads back inside for a small lunch before he returns to his ritual.  
He finishes the preparations, then takes out a small rod made of moon-crystal. Now he follows his nocturnal idea and stirs the mixture counterclockwise exactly 29.53 times.

There is only one step left. Experienced, he places a knife on his lower left arm and sets a small precise cut. Once again the unpleasant thought crosses his mind how many scars the long years of using Dark Magic (or Life Magic, as he prefers to call it) have left on his body.  
In his youth, he had been admired and envied for his good looks by people of all species and gender, and they would probably still think of him as beautiful, but if they would get close, they could see the numerous cuts on his arms and hands. And they would definitely change their mind if they saw how his once black hair had turned white from the use of Dark Magic.  
In the past he had thought about hiding his scars with the use of a simple butterfly. But they are a part of him, a sign of his growth and his achievements. Practicing Life Magic is nothing that needs to be hidden.

The blood drips from his arm into the prepared bowl. Every drop fizzles when it hits the mixture and steam rises up. Aaravos counts seven drops, then heals himself.  
Finally he sets the mixture on fire and says the spell.  
He loves this moment, the anticipation. All the time, all the thought, preparation and effort could pay off. But one wrong ingredient or spell, a wrong move, one second of inobservance and the magic would not only fail, it could explode, figuratively or literally, and endanger Aaravos’ property, life and soul. It gives him a rush unmatched by anything.  
There is no loud bang or lightning effect only a quiet woosh as the flame evaporates. The mixture is gone. Instead, the bowl is filled with a silvery-blue liquid that radiates a soft white glow.  
Aaravos downs it without hesitation, his eyes still black from the use of Dark Magic. For a second nothing happens. Then, a soft wind ripples from his head to his feet, twirling his long hair, waving his cloak.  
In an insant, he is gone. Only when we look very closely, we can see a ripple of his silhouette in the air and his irises and the little star markings his body is speckled with are faintly visible in a soft red glow.  
Aaravos grins, his teeth glimmering in the same soft read. His heart is racing, his skin tingling. He feels awake, alert, alive.

He did it. He has successfully recreated the moonshadow form only accessable to the moonshadow elves. Still smiling, he inspects his almost invisible arms. Granted, his markings are glowing red instead of blue-green, but some changes are inevitable when recreating something using Dark Magic.  
He leaves his study and heads towards his dressing room, the only room with a full body mirror (well, one of the two, but he isn’t going to think of that one, not now), and inspects his full form. He can see a robe, a cloak and a skirt floating over some boots. Hm. Apparently, the spell doesn’t extend to his clothes. That is something he should add, he was not going to strip naked to be invisible.   
But not today. Today he is going to write down the ritual and then open a bottle of wine to celebrate his sucess. It is not like he is in any hurry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anybody has an idea of how to better describe Aaravos' clothing then cloak, robe and skirt(!), please tell me!


	3. Wednesday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am sorry to the one person who bookmarked this for not being on time with the update. I will continue and finish this fic, work just gets in the way. Thanks for reading, I really appreciate.

The next day, Aaravos stays in bed a bit longer than usual. There is no work waiting for him, other than his daily business.  
Eventually, he gets up, does his workout, has breakfast, tends to the gardens. Somehow it feels even more repetitive and boring than usual. While he is preparing and having lunch, he contemplates what to do the rest of the day. He could work on yesterdays ritual to make it extend to clothes, but editing a spell is nowhere near as thrilling as inventing or discovering one. Besides, he had been very productive the previous day, he deserves a lazy day.  
When he is finished with eating, he has decided on reading a novel. Of course he has read every single book within his prison before, but luckily he has a very large library, so when he is done with the last book it has been a few years since he read the first one.  
His library is in the basement. It doesn’t have a window so Aaravos uses a moon rune to create a glowing orb of moonlight. He would never bring fire down here, the last thing he needs is his prison to burn down, leaving him to live on burned ashes for the next decades. He could probably fix it, but he doesn’t intend to take any chances in this regard.  
In the glowing moonlight we can see just how big the library is. Two stories, connected with a gallery and large rolling staircases. Aaravos takes his time deciding on a book. It is more difficult than he thought. Even though it has been years since he last read them, he still knows their content by heart. In the end he takes one at random and heads back upstairs to his living room. He dosn’t really »live« here often. It is a room to be used in company and that had been rare even before he was imprisoned.  
He sits down and starts reading. After an hour he looks up. Sofas, chairs, low tables, a tray for tea or snacks, a shelf with a glass door with glasses and wine bottles. The book sinks into the elfs lap. He had always been a lone wolf, living alone and spending weeks in his study without going out once. He never used to feel lonely. He thought he didn’t need other people. And for the first months, even years of his imprisonment this really hadn’t been an issue.  
But then, ever so slowly, he started to feel a void in his chest. A gaping hole that seemed to grow. He doesn’t feel it often, but now it is back, eating at him from the inside. His mind wanders. He thinks of the battles he fought, the people he convinced to follow him. His allies, his enemies. He hadn’t called any of them a friend, he hadn’t even liked most of them. Still, it had been fun to persuade them, outsmart them, but also to teach them, learn from them.  
He remembers the market in the town near where his land used to be, where he used to buy his supplies, a long, long time ago. It had been an annoying necessity, but now he catches himself missing even the small talk he had had with the vendors. The lady with the honey who always greeted him with his name instead of his title. The farmer who always asked how his garden was doing. The little children that followed him, the great archmage, but ran away as soon as he looked at them. Even the waitress in his favourite restaurant who dared to ask him _every single time_ when he would bring a little girlfriend.  
The void inside him seems to grow as he gets lost in these memories, his bones get heavy and the light seems to lose some of its brightness.  
Aaravos catches himself. He shakes his head, closes the book and gets up. This is not good.  
Perhaps it is time to check _that_ room. He leaves the living room, ascends to the second floor and walks down the corridor. At the very end is a delicate door. It isn’t much different to all the other doors in his mansion, a bit bigger than most, but smaller than the main door or the double doors to the library. The room behind this door didn’t use to be out of the ordinary either. It had been his reading room and the fireplace with plenty of bookshelves around it is still there, as are the delicate table and chair. Aaravos used to like this room, with it’s large window and light design. Nowadays he despises it.  
The elf reaches the door. Next to it shimmers a purple rune that spans the wall from floor to ceiling. Other star-mages would recognize it as a time rune that allows the user to slow time within a specified area. Aaravos has hundreds of them and their counterpart, the time acceleration rune, across his land. Small time slowing runes at his kitchen and study cabinetts allow his food and the ingredients for his Dark Magic spells to stay fresh for a long time. A time accelleration rune makes his plants grow faster so he can harvest almost every day.  
But this rune is by far the largest and most powerful: It spans the entirety of his prison and slows time drastically. Months in the outside world pass by in a day in his prison.  
When he was free, he was careful with his time runes, always calculating the days he skipped or took, as to not lose contact to the real time. Some star-mages slowed time for themselves on purpose, so they could live centuries and appear to be immortal. But they lost contact to the rest of the world, they couldn’t engage in politics or have realtionships. Aaravos has to admit that even back than a part of him knew that he needs this contact.  
But in here, what is the point? He cannot interact with the outside world anyway and he cannot escape. He really can’t, because he tried, oh how hard he tried. His only hope is that one day that stupid dragon will die or slip in his wariness, so he can take advantage of an outsider. He hates that he is dependent on outsiders, but by now, he would take anyone. Unfortunately, dragons have a very long life expectancy and Avizandum and his wife are very careful not to let anyone close to _that_ mirror.

Aaravos deactivates the rune next to the door with a wave of his hand, collects himself and opens the door. He walks in, his body forcefully relaxed, yet elegant, his expression a carefully guarded mask of disinterest. He enters the room once a day to give Avizandum the chance to check on him. For the dragon it’s once every few months that he can see the startouchelf come in collecting a book or looking out the window for a while, before leaving, not having aged a bit. At least that is what Aaravos hopes the dragon sees and thinks.  
He saunters to the bookshelves, his coat floating behind him, and takes his time to decide on a book. He is careful not to look at the mirror.  
The window to his prison, a tall mirror with beautiful golden frame, is standing opposite to the window. Even without looking at it, he can feel its presence. He picks a book and turnes to leave. While turning he gives the mirror a quick glance. The runes around the edges are dark. Aaravos relaxes a little, while being disappointed at the same time. The runes are not activated, the dragon isn’t currently watching him. Well, he would have to wait another month, because Aaravos doesn’t intend to return to the room this day.  
He leaves and reactivates the time rune. Somehow he feels even more lonely now. He closes his eyes for a moment to collect his thoughts. This is just his mind and body reacting to the high he had yesterday. It would pass. It always did.


End file.
